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Duke Nukem Forever Physics Impress
rauper wrote in to alert us to a GameIndustry.biz story. The quote says it all: "Swedish company Meqon, the firm behind the physics for 3D Realms' Duke Nukem Forever, has rekindled interest in the long-delayed game with a stunning demonstration of its latest physics technology."
Especially for this type of hyped-up claim, I'd really like the opportunity to judge, or at least see it for myself. If you say you're going to change the world, I'd prefer you bring some evidence to the table rather than have closed-door accounts spinning your PR for you.
I've never played these soccer games, but I'd guess that not needing a physics engine to make a good game (neither do FPS's...) that any cloth like appearance of a net is just tricks that programmers use. It would be relatively easy to code a flexible moving net that looks right when a soccer ball hits it without making a real physics engine that handles cloth. So yes, there's every chance that this fabric stuff in this physics engine is far more powerful and "real" than in a soccer game.
Jesus, I wish I could just mod this overrated, but I'll have to respond.
IIRC, Duke came out at approximately the same time as Quake. Its interactivity and humor (juvenile though it was) are unparalleled in any game since.
I remember walking over dead guys and leaving bloody footprints, flushing a toilet which overflowed and left watery footprints, seeing myself in a mirror, tossing remote-detonated bombs and blasting them from a block away, shrinking my opponents and stepping on them.
There's a lot of hype about the wonderful immerson of Half Life's story, but what happened in HL2? Awesome atmosphere, but where's the story? It had a plot like a movie tie-in theme park ride.
Duke innovated, and if there is even some tiny vestige of its original spirit left in the company, with today's technology, it will be a favorite of the next generation of gamers, as it was with my generation.
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Physics isn't just a "buzzword." Physics is what makes a game real, far more than graphics. Hell, simply by porting any recent physics engine to Quake would make it an entirely different game. I spent my first hour in HL2 just throwing bottles at a lady in the train station!
Proper physics engines make it possible to model reality, and that's the goal of every game from fantasy to sports: to render a consistent world.
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The page contained no concrete information, it could have been a rewritten press release for all I could see. The "links" linked not to anything relevent but to ads - for example, the link on Duke's "technology" went straight to an ad for Microsoft LiveMeeting.
This is obviously a click farm, albeit a slightly cleverer one than usual.
So far there's no evidence that DNF is anything but vapourware. An article that talks excitedly about improvements in realism, without showing any evidence, and whose links turn out to be ads, strikes me as about as trustworthy a source as an email entitled "L@@K! FR33 V10XX 1N Y0UR MA1LB0X N0W!!"
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I read the blog of Scott Miller, CEO of 3DRealms, quite frequently. He's a really smart guy. If companies followed the advice he dishes out on his blog, they'd be much better off. He's especially keen on marketing. For example, he has some great ideas on naming games and on avoiding using long titles like Star Wars Dark Forces II Jedi Knight III etc. Very smart stuff.
So why he has so f-ed up the marketing on DNF is beyond me. Frankly, I think he's betrayed the relationship between developer and fan more than nearly any other gaming single company. The problem is not that they've taken so long. If they had never released any information at all about DNF but simply announced the game and released it a year later after a PR blitz, it wouldn't have been a big deal. People might've wondered why it took so long, but they'd probably be too busy playing the game to care.
Instead, Miller and 3dr has arrogantly strung their fans along by surfacing every 2-3 years with a carrot of information or screenshots or an E3 preview. Then, when the enthusiasm level is just enough to maintain a slight knowledge of the game, they dive back into the murky depths of "when it's done."
"When it's done" does not inherently violate the relationship between developer and fan. But as soon as companies like 3drealms start relying on fan enthusiasm and fan network news distribution, they owe more to them than to snub their nose at the fans, say in a British Lord accent, "When it's done," and then walk away backs turned. DNF is a perfect example of this elitism.
There was a sociological study done a few years back that showed that the time people wait for things demonstrates the level in society of the two groups of people. This study was talking specifically about people waiting in doctor's offices or at a government institution. The longer people waited in these offices, the more important the person was they were waiting for - either a doctor or an institution. The longer we sit in a waiting room, the more we need to be in the waiting room. Doctors and buerocrats can get away with that because of their level of importance in society. Simply, we need them more than they need us, and that's why we wait.
But there's a discrepency in this when we apply this same theory to gaming. We don't need a DNF as much as Scott Miller and gang need us. We've been getting along fine without them. And perhaps Miller and 3drealms have enough money that they don't need to work quickly on the game, but if they have other aspirations for DNF - for it to become a benchmark, or just known as a really fun game - they're going to have to drop this elitist "when it's done" attitude and do one of two things: a) shut up about the game and stop releasing any kind of information like this, or b) set a date for the game and stick to it as best as they can.
Some of the more succesfull studios get away with "when it's done," namely id and Blizzard to name a few. This is just the validity of the sociological study; that we actually do "need" a game from id and Blizzard and are willing to wait long enough. Why this works for id and Blizzard and not 3drealms is that the first two companies have never betrayed the trust. While utilizing the fan network and and fan ethusiasm, they have never taken advantage of fans to maintain momentum while they diddle-dally on a game. 3drealms has violated that relationship - time again and time again. Gamers are a very forgiving bunch - throw a great screenshot their way and usually all is forgiven - but I think that DNF has broken a cardinal rule, and "fans" may relegated it to special level of gamer hell.
That's why I said "render a consistent world." The world doesn't necessarily have to be just like ours, but it should adhere to a set of physical laws such that your actions entail logical reactions.
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